Did you know you could use your iPhone to take pictures and modify them with WordPress for your website? I bet this never crossed your mind.

In last weeks post, I showed how to use an iPhone to publish images to your blog. I also mentioned two facts you need to know and understand about images (file size & resolution). Today I want to talk to you about the Power of WordPress to Modify Images you uploaded, from a camera or a phone.

Typically, when you are looking at images on your phone or a camera, there is more information than meets the eye. For example: have you ever tried to text someone an image from your Phone? An iPhone will ask you prior to sending a text message, how large of an attachment do you want to send? Small, medium or large.

How about downloading an image from your camera, then emailing that image without modifying the image with software like Photoshop? When sending, you may be notified that the attachment is too large. An email service like Yahoo will only let you attach a 2MB photo. Either way, most images start their lives much larger than 2MB.

Image Sizes:

Now, enters your blog and the fact that you want to share images from either type of device (phone or camera). The good news, you are reading this post and hopefully you will know how to modify large photos in a couple of simple steps. Keep in mind, large images (over 100KB) you should reduce the overall size. WordPress is a very powerful and flexible CMS (Content Management System) and some of the tools are very clear. However, if you don’t know the horsepower of what you are using (because you are not in the business of building web sites) you may not know or understand some of these features. My hope is that you will find this useful and informative.

Editing Photos:

Go into the dashboard of your blog (log-in), then browse to the Media gallery. Select “Upload” you will see a message: “Maximum upload file size: 25-50MB” (this upload size varies based on your site configuration). Take a step back and reflect how large a file 25MB is…If we were still using dial up modems (56K – thank goodness they are gone) – it would take over 6 hours to download one image. Even if you have a good connection today is only seconds on a land line we also need to account for mobile traffic. Also, search engines want your images to be small in file size. This will affect your ranking in a negative way, and instead of being on page 1 you will be on page 3 of search results. Now, let’s look at two example images (one native resolution and one modified by WordPress) below.

Click to Zoom:

Full Resolution 3.45MB

Resolution adjusted 126KB

In the above examples, the first image is full resolution and untouched from a camera. As you can see it is a large image that takes some time in downloading. The second image I used the controls in the media library to modify it.

To use WordPress to make changes to images, open the Media library then select an image. As seen below, in the right hand column you will see the image properties. To use the editor for cropping and image size adjustments select “Edit Image”

Patriot-ParacordFull.jpg

April 8, 2015

3 MB

4608 × 3456

Edit Image Delete Permanently

Below you can see the controls on the page to modify the image (crop, rotate, flip or dimensions “Scale Image”). Scale image will automatically modify both dimensions by changing just one of the values. So if you know your blog should have a 800 pixel wide image, you can quickly modify and the height ratio will fall in line to keep the image from looking distorted.For example: most of the images sizes on my site I have changed the first dimension to “1500” and that works perfect for my design.

You can also select the controls directly above the image to “zoom” in on the image for example. First, click and drag with your mouse to select the portion of the image you want to keep. Once you’re happy with the selection, click on the Crop button. Then select the “Crop” button above the image. Once selected you will see a preview of the image changes.

Last Step select “SAVE” under the image once you are done.

Thank you to the guys over at Patriot-Paracord.com for supplying the images for this post. If you have not seen their site yet, check it out. This site is also built on WordPress using the plugin for eCommerce “WooCommerce”. In future posts I will explore with you some of the very simple yet effective solution from them.

Until next time – in the meantime go ahead and step out there to see what you can do if you use your iPhone to take pictures and modify them with WordPress